1.) First, paint the wire mesh baskets white. I neglected to do this at the beginning and had to go back and try and paint AROUND the circles. Not fun times. Remove the bulbs from your lamp. This should allow you to remove the plastic “shades”.

2.) Using the hole in the original shade as a guide, cut out enough of the bottom of the mesh pieces to fit in the original shade’s place. Set Aside.

3.) Layer 2-4 sheets of wax paper on some newspaper. Use your iron on a very low setting, iron the paper. The wax between the paper will melt and create a layered, rather thick shell-looking material.

4.) Using the tool of your choice, cut 2-3in circles out of the material. I opted to let my Silhouette Cameo do the hard work here- cutting around 400 circles.

5.) Using the monofilament, string as many of the circles together on a string as you need to go top to bottom of your upper shade. For me this was 6 circles a strand. I pierced the circles with a needle strung with the monofilament., I tied a knot after each circle so that they wouldn’t slide down the filament.

6.) One string at a time, fill up the tiers of your lamp. For me, I did 4 tiers, with each about 30 strands.

7.) Now that the top is done, let’s move onto the accent lamp. Since this one sits sideways most of the time, it wouldn’t work to do the filament trick. I was worried those strings would tangle with the movement this spotlight gets. So instead, I punched a hole in each circle and hooked it with a large jewelry “jump” ring.

8.) Using a similar tier methods, but with each tier only 1 circle, attach circles all over the accent lamp.

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Jules IKEAHacker "I am Jules, the engine behind IKEAHackers and the one who keeps this site up and running. My mission is to capture all the wonderful, inspiring, clever hacks and ideas for our much loved IKEA items".

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